-LRB- CNN -RRB- -- Flush with cash and drunk with power after its $ 100 billion IPO , Facebook could be caught secretly brainwashing millions of new users into signing up -LRB- mind-control hoodies , anyone ? -RRB- -- and still I might not quit the world 's largest social network .

Ridiculous scenario aside , I 'm pretty serious . Despite ongoing privacy concerns and rumblings of a backlash , it would take something drastic to make me leave Facebook at this point .

More than just a daily habit , Facebook has become the place where I get important , often surprising glimpses into the lives of the 1,365 people with whom I 've chosen to connect . -LRB- That 's not counting friends-of-friends , for Facebook 's tentacles are ever-extended -RRB- .

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I 'm not always in love with Facebook , of course . I get frustrated with the social network like everyone else . Every six months , Facebook introduces some huge new design of its site or engages in privacy-eroding practices that send many of its users howling into the status-update box .

They threaten to shut down their accounts , write furious blog posts and organize ridiculous movements such as Quit Facebook Day , which got less than 40,000 people to commit to deleting themselves -- a tiny fraction of the network even back in 2010 .

But , in large part , the people who say they 're leaving Facebook do n't . Or they quit and come back .

Me , I 'm staying put . At this point , complaining about Facebook is like grousing about the electric company while watching TV , or saying how lousy politicians are but forgetting to vote . Facebook just is . It 's become an institution -- one that 's going to be around for a long while -- and all the missteps it 's made in its young , eight-year life have never prompted significant user defection .

Counterpoint : Why I quit Facebook , and am not looking back

Facebook is on track to hit a billion users sometime this year . A billion people . With just a few exceptions , that includes nearly every person I have ever worked with , a big chunk of my extended family , most of my friends going all the way back to elementary school and probably all the kids who were in my nursery at the hospital where I was born .

There 's critical mass , and then there 's Facebook , the Death Star that deflects every effort to blow it up . Facebook has won the social-media wars because it 's where all the people are . Those who have been waiting for something else to take its place , the way Facebook siphoned off the population of MySpace about five years ago , are still waiting . MySpace , even at its peak , never had the mainstream acceptance and durability of Facebook .

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I post lots of random thoughts and news links on Twitter , share photos of my wanderings on Instagram and still check in on the increasingly hollow Google + on a daily basis . But everything I post to those services also ends up on Facebook because it 's the platform that feels the most robust and future-proof .

Infographic : How we use Facebook

Since Facebook introduced its controversial Timeline design last year , my important personal milestones -LRB- college graduation , marriage , the births of my daughters , the `` Friday Night Lights '' finale -RRB- all have neatly filed themselves into the digital record of my life .

That 's what Facebook wants , of course . But I 've come to stop resisting its voracious appetite for personal information .

If I did n't share , and my friends and relatives and co-workers did n't share , I 'd be less apt to know who just got engaged , who just celebrated a graduation or who in my online community just died suddenly . When my grandmother died earlier this year , it was the place my relatives posted photos of her I 'd never seen before . It was where far-flung friends and family members offered their condolences for weeks after the funeral service .

Sure , we 've seen the inevitable backlash as Facebook has grown to include everyone from your grandmother to that third-grade classmate you never really wanted to hear from again . But lately , it feels like the arguments in favor of leaving Mark Zuckerberg 's social network have gotten weaker as people become more resigned to the notion of a permanent Facebook .

Timeline : Mark Zuckerberg 's rise from child prodigy to Facebook billionaire

When Facebook recently bought photo-sharing app Instagram for $ 1 billion , Instagram users vowed to quit , complaining that their precious little network had sold out to a monolithic company . -LRB- Funny , that did n't stop Instagram from jumping from 30 million users to 50 million in about a month . -RRB-

Would-be competitors who have tried to take on Facebook have largely failed to gain traction . Path , which has a lovely interface and is more focused on smaller circles of friends , just hit 2 million users a few months ago . And Diaspora , the open-source , nonprofit that was supposed to threaten Facebook 's laissez-faire attitude toward privacy , has yet to crack half a million users .

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Once Facebook has shareholders to answer to , things may change . But perhaps not as much as you 'd expect . At a South by Southwest Interactive event in 2008 , I saw Zuckerberg speak about his company to application developers . Even then , he stressed that the future of Facebook was not as a website or tool , but as a global communication platform upon which other things would be built . It 's been amazing to observe how little he 's veered from that vision during four years of astronomical growth .

If something is ever going to take the place of Facebook once the company gets so big and complacent that it loses focus , it will probably be something built on top of Facebook . Perhaps a mobile app that accesses the social network 's huge population , something Facebook-adjacent that takes what people like about Facebook and turns it into something more nimble and attractive than Facebook itself .

Maybe then I 'll think about pulling up stakes . Until then , I 'm not leaving .

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Omar Gallaga : Facebook is where I get important glimpses into 1,365 `` friends ''

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Everything I post to Twitter or Google + also ends up on Facebook , Gallaga says

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If something ever surpasses Facebook , it may be a mobile app , Gallaga says